Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [361]
I’d had limited exposure to Petraeus at the time, so before settling on him I asked other senior officers for their assessments. The consensus was that he was cerebral, and savvy with the press. His personal public relations abilities were so good that the views of some of his colleagues were mixed. But despite some reservations by senior uniformed officials, I decided Petraeus would be a good fit for a mission in need of strong leadership.* In June 2004, Petraeus deployed on his second tour to Iraq and took charge of training and equipping the Iraqi security forces, with a mandate to make sure they could assume more responsibility fighting the insurgency.8
Generals Abizaid and Casey and I agreed that putting Iraqis forward to take the fight to the enemy and assume leadership of their country was our best weapon against the insurgency and the surest way to avoid more U.S. casualties that would eventually sap the political will for America’s effort in Iraq. We hoped that as Iraqis gained control of their destiny, the terrorists and regime remnants would no longer be seen as standing in opposition to Americans or coalition occupiers. Instead, the insurgents would be seen for what they were—opponents of the legitimate, elected Iraqi government.
When asked by reporters about the first signs of a sustained and organized resistance in April 2004 following the flare-up in Fallujah, I said, “Thugs and assassins and former Saddam henchmen will not be allowed to carve out portions of that city and to oppose peace and freedom. The dead enders, threatened by Iraq’s progress to self-government, may believe they can drive the coalition out through terror and intimidation, and foment civil war among Sunnis and Shias, or block the path to Iraqi self-rule, but they’re badly mistaken.”9 Some in the media mistook my use of the phrase “dead enders” to mean I was suggesting that victory was imminent, that the enemy would soon be defeated.10 In fact, my meaning was exactly the opposite—namely that our forces were locked in a bloody struggle with an enemy that would fight to the bitter end, to their deaths. Rather than dismissing the insurgents, I was saying that because they would fight to the end, our work against them would be difficult.11
In its early months the insurgency was dominated by former Baathist regime holdouts. Later, evidence was discovered that suggested that Saddam had planned to mount an insurgency if his conventional forces were unable to turn back a U.S.-led invasion. Saddam’s intelligence service disseminated messages to its members to organize a resistance by forming cells and training terrorists in the event of the regime’s collapse.12 General Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Saddam’s close associates and later a leader of the insurgency, led a secret program to launch a guerrilla war under the Unified Mujahedeen Command.13 Baathists, whose ideology is secular, nevertheless tapped into the potent force of jihadism, attracting devout fanatics to their cause.
The Baathist-jihadist axis, at least in its early phases, was less of an insurgency—an armed political movement that arose organically from the general population—and more a counterrevolution. It consisted mainly of Baathists seeking a return of their dictatorial power. When CENTCOM produced a list of the thirty-nine top leaders in the insurgency in the fall of 2004, almost all were connected to the old regime of Saddam. Indeed, early on one prominent insurgent group called itself “the Party of the Return.”14
The insurgency began primarily as an effort to reclaim Sunni supremacy